Kankakee Valley Post, Volume 3, Number 5, DeMotte, Jasper County, 15 June 1933 — Oh Cynthia! [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Oh Cynthia!

By NORMA KNIGHT

WNU Service

Business taking him to Denver, Geoffrey Ensloe, young chemical engineer, takes up his residence with his mother’s girlhood friends. They seem a happy, carefree family, Captain Cary; “Miss Nona" Aylesbury, the captain’s daughter; Cary, thoughtless though likable youngster; little Tenny Montague, motherless, who lives with the Carys--and Cynthia. Geoff finds himself very much “at home,’’ though Cynthia puzzles him. She is, apparently against the wishes of her family, running a "'gift shop,” and astonishes Geoff by the suggestion that he pay board money, to her, unknown to her mother. He agrees, though much mystified. Cary’s specialty seems to be securing and losing jobs, coupled with financial extravagance, which Cynthia openly resents. Geoff becomes prejudiced against the girl for her seeming penuriousness.

CHAPTER IV--Continued --4--But in the rear of the shop was something that interested him: two comfortwere pulled up to a long which lay various magazines. A low bookcase overflowed with volumes whose titles brought a look of surprise to Geoff. There was late fiction --that was to be expected; but there was also a modest collection of technical books, several of which Geoff had sought for in vain in the book shop. Toward one of these he stretched out his hand eagerly. Fifteen minutes later some one spoke to him. From the fact that she wore no hat and seemed to be en-

tirely at home, Geoff judged that this was the “dish-faced” Elsie Dunsmore. “How do you do?” she said pleasantly. “I think you’re a stranger to the Odds and Ends. I hope you’ve found something that interests you!” “I have indeed!” He held up the book. “May I ask how you happen to have a book like this in your stock?” “Miss Aylesbury chose it. You see, that’s why we have these chairs, this case of books: so that shoppers like yourself may drop in for a few minutes to read and rest. Miss Aylesbury tries to cater to all tastes. You’ll see there are books on architecture, on gardening, on mining, on child welfare.” Geoff nodded. His thoughts were busy with a certain morning when he had told at the breakfast table of his unavailing search for this particular book. Why had Cynthia not mentioned she had it in the shop? Was it because she resented his disapproval of her business? Or had she--Geoff would have liked to believe this but somehow he couldn’t--had she known where to buy it and done so because he had spoken of it? Ruefully admitted that Cynthia was rapidly divesting him of that complacency which was the result of his popularity at home. The little stabs she administered to his self-esteem were all the more effective because they were not premeditated. Either Cynthia had owned the book and disdained to mention it, or she had bought it because she thought it might interest other men--and disdained to mention it! Both explanations afforded little satisfaction to the tall young man who stood gripping the volume and staring vacantly at Cynthia’s clerk. came out of his trance presently, restored the book to its place and went forward resignedly to justify his presence by a purchase. Elsie was busy, he was glad to see; too busy to wait on him. That spoke well for the business of the shop. “Are you always as busy as this?” he asked when she was free to attend to him. She shook her head. “It’s the final spurt of the tourist season. People on their way home stop in to buy souvenirs. Yes, madam,” she interrupted herself to say, “we have colored photographs of the Big Thompson Canyon but we also have water colors that you may like better.” When the customer departed she returned to Geoff. “I’m just a clerk here. C. C. owns the shop.” “C. C.?” “Cynthia Cary Aylesbury. We used to call her C. C. in high school.” “You’re a schoolmate of hers, then?”

“Oh, yes. I even planned to go East to college with her but things happened and I couldn’t; and poor Cynthia had to come home herself in her junior year.” “Had to? I thought she came because she was tired of it!” Elsie looked belligerent. “Cynthia never gives things up because she’s tired! If she did, she’d give this store up in a hurry. The way that girl works--” She caught herself up abruptly, realizing how freely she had been discussing her employer with a stranger. “That’s all right,” Geoff reassured her. “I’m a friend of her mother. Tell me more about the shop, if you don’t mind. I’m deeply interested.” “Why, you see, Cynthia wanted to do something when she came back from college. So she started the Odds and Ends. She had a little money left her by her father--she put it all into this shop. At first she did everything herself: had her lunch brought in, went without dinner until after she’d closed up. Then business picked up and pretty soon she asked me if I wouldn’t like to help her. You bet I did, too,” said Elsie with convincing simplicity. “There isn’t much I wouldn’t do for Cynthia, if it comes to that.” “So the shop really pays for itself?” She gave him an odd look. “It has to,” she said briefly. “If you know Cynthia you know it’s a live-or-die proposition with her. She doesn’t go into anything lightly.” “I should say not!” Geoff declared. “We’ve got to make enough,” she chattered on, “to see us through the dull season that comes between the tourist trade and the Christmas sales. November is a total loss as far as gift shops are concerned.” Her eyes traveled to a banjo clock that ticked on the wall. “Cynthla’ll be back any minute now, and she’ll tell you anything you want to know about the shop.” Geoff said guiltily that he couldn’t wait; selected a particularly hideous and expensive “desk set” and escaped with it before Cynthia’s return. His purchase gave him some little trouble before he finally prevailed on a waitress at the case where he ate his lunch to accept it. His visit to the shop had cleared up one thing that was beginning to trouble him. A dim idea that the family might be in some manner dependent upon the profits from the Odds and Ends had haunted him for several days. But several things contradicted that theory. Every month, for example, Captain Cary slit a certain gray envelope and extracted a check. “Royalties from a little patent of mine," he always said with open pride. Sometimes he handed it to his daughter and bade her buy herself “something pretty” with it; sometimes he tucked it away in his wallet. Then, too, Miss Nona sometimes carelessly referred to her husband’s “estate.” That word meant to Geoff the large holdings which had come to his mother and himself from his father. There was no evidence of want in the house where he lived. Miss Nona wore the prettiest of clothes, the food was abundant if somewhat plain, Cary’s light-hearted indifference to his jobs did not indicate financial stress. But still, Geoff told himself, that might be the explanation of Cynthia’s penuriousness. He almost hoped it was. He hated to think of a girl so young being so grasping. But after his talk with Elsie he was more than ever convinced that ambition combined with a stubborn determination to have her own way was the motive back of Cynthia’s appropriation of Tenny’s board money and his own. “You’re a throwback,” his mother had told him more than once. “Down in your heart you disapprove of the modern woman, especially the woman in business. You’d like to have all of my sex dependent on yours for spending money. Your idea of a woman’s whole duty is making herself attractive to her man.” Geoff had laughed but he knew that there was some truth in what she said. Miss Nona came very near to being his ideal of womanhood. She was so gentle so sweet, so sympathetc. She was feminine to her fingertips, with all the little arts and graces of a bygone generation. Miss Nona listened with flattering attention to what he said of his laboratory work, though he knew the chemical terms were so much Greek to her. She was everything he had longed for and missed in his mother, in short; and the contrast between her and Cynthia increased his antagonism toward the girl. “Darn it! Why can’t she be like Miss Nona?” he fretted. “She gives me a pain with her checking up everything poor little Tenny does, her cross-questioning of Cary, even her implied rebukes of her mother! Fall in love with her--I’d as soon--sooner! --grow sentimental over the marble lady in the garden! She may be hard but at least she’s mighty ornamental.” ******* Almost every Sunday Geoff spent the day in the mountains. Miss Nona and

the Captain often went with him if the destination was not too high or the ride too long. Tenny would come if Cynthia would; but Cynthia wouldn’t. She pleaded fatigue from her long week, or accounts to be gone over. So it was with a sense of real triumph that Geoff prevailed upon her one October morning to drive with them all to Red Rock lake. “We’ll pack a basket,” Cynthia said, entering into the plan with an enthusiasm which astounded its promoter. “There’s chicken--Marguerite can fry it and we’ll pack it in the thermos basket so it will stay hot. We’ll build a fire and make coffee just for the outdoorsiness of it.” Tenny capered about the room with joy and Miss Nona beamed at her daughter. '“Like to drive?” Geoff asked Cynthia as they went down the steps together. To his surprise she took the seat behind the wheel and presently they were bowling smoothly along. Cynthia drove steadily, surely. Every foot of the way seemed to be familiar to her and she looked younger and happier than Geoff had ever seen her. She had discarded her hat, and the tendrils of hair curled about her forehead endearingly. Geoff marveled at the change in her. She was gay, youthful, charming. She had dropped her weariness, her hint of hostility toward him, her air of worry, like a cloak. Geoff was suddenly in wild spirits. It seemed to him that never was there so congenial a party as his. What a dinner that was! Marguerite’s fried chicken was crisp and hot; her buttered rolls melted in their mouths. “Why do we. have to go down?” Tenny asked wistfully. “Why don’t we just send Cary and Geoff back for some blankets and things and stay up here all the time?” “By this time tomorrow night there may be three feet of snow right where you’re sitting,” Cynthia told her. “I don’t remember another October as warm as this up here.” “Something else has thawed out for Geoff’s benefit." Cary said significantly. “Your manner toward him, my dear sister!” “Don’t you like Geoff, Cynthia?” Tenny wanted to know. She laughed, flushed a little. “I like everybody today! Oh, you can’t think what it’s like to exchange the stale air in the shop for the piny breezes up here! I’m like Tenny--I want to stay for ever!” After dinner Geoff and Cynthia, with Tenny darting ahead of them, completed the circuit of the lake. Geoff remembered that walk for a long time.

Cynthia walked shoulder to shoulder with him, sometimes stopping to point out a snowy peak that rose above the rest of the chain, sometimes stirring the pine-needles in the path to reveal a mat of kinnikinic. Somehow they strayed on to the subject of Tenny, and Cynthia talked to him freely about the child. “She was a delicate little thing when she first came to us. Even now we have to watch her carefully.” “She seems sound as a dollar now,” he answered. “Oh, she is! Except that she mustn’t have any more colds. That’s why”--he realized that for the first time she was offering an explanation of one of the things he had disliked in her--“why I’m so strict with her about her cod liver oil and wearing her sweater and all. Tenny respects authority.” “Is that why she adores you?” he asked with a touch of irony. She hesitated. “Do I seem to you specially authoritative? I suppose I do.” Suddenly she turned to him. “Geoff, perhaps I’m not quite as hard as you think I am! At any rate, Tenny has to be handled very carefully. She’s lived in so many places, she’s had so many ups and downs that she had acquired a rather terrible distrust of people when she came to us.” “She needed your mother’s petting,” he said.

Cynthia smiled. “Miss Nona’s strong point is petting. You come in for a good share of it.” “And, like Tenny, I thrive on it,” he replied somewhat aggressively. “As I’ve told you, my parents were abroad during most of my childhood and I know what Tenny went through at boarding school.” “It must have been hard for your mother,” Cynthia commented, “being pulled between her duty to you and to her husband. I--I know this will add to your belief in my hardness!--I’m glad she was the sort of woman who put her husband first! There’s something so magnificent about that sort of love,” she said wistfully. “Something so royal in a marriage which allows nothing--not even children--to disturb it!” Geoff was silent through sheer astonishment. Cynthia’s words gave him too a new vision of his mother. For the first time he was able to think of her as a wife as well as a somewhat casual mother. It was nearly sunset before they turned the car downward and began the long descent from mountain heights to the city below. Geoff had a feeling of extraordinary satisfaction over the day. Cynthia’s mind to him heretofore had been like a long corridor in which door after door stood, all closed. Today she had opened several of them and given him fascinating peeps at the rooms within. CHAPTER V Tenny. All the doors were slammed shut again in the days which followed. Sometimes Geoff wondered if that day at Red Rock lake with a companionable Cynthia, a slightly wistful Cynthia, had ever existed save in his imagination. The girl not only resumed her old reserve but became so irritable and impatient that the little buds of friendship which had sprouted between them withered and died. Definitely he did not like this girl, he told himself. He wondered sometimes if it was his presence in her home which so annoyed her; for that she was annoyed beyond her usual manner was evident to him from her family’s comments. “What does ail Cynthia!" Miss Nona sighed. “She’s so unlike-herself these days." “Sis, for the love of Mike!” It was Cary’s exasperated voice. “You haven’t spoken a pleasant word for days--do you realize it? Come on now, Cynthia! You say the shop is doing well--” “Cary!” Cynthia’s voice cut in so sharply that Geoff started. “Who is that fair-haired girl you’re driving about these days?” Her brother laughed. “That’s where the shoe pinches, isn’t it, Cynthia--to change the metaphor?” “Of course it pinches. It ought to pinch you, too. Do you think that it’s fair--as things are?” For once there was resentment In Cary’s pleasant young voice. "My dear Miss Atlas, didn’t you ever hear that no one is actually indispensable in this world? If you were to go to Europe tomorrow--” “Or die,” she amended. “Never mind me, Cary. I’m cross as two sticks these days.” “Sis, are you sure you’re well? Seems to me you never used to be so snappy, so--er--bitter. Don’t you love your big brother--one--bit?” The pauses were filled by his hand on her hair, rumpling it out of its usual smoothness. She was laughing when she escaped. But the irritability persisted. “Cynthia, my dear,” the Captain said gravely one evening, “I really must protest against your overworking as you are doing. Is it necessary for you to remain so long at the shop every night?” Cynthia made no reply beyond a weary smile at him. It was Tenny as usual who struck straight from the shoulder. “She’s let Elsie go. She has to stay till closing time every night.” “You’ve let Elsie go?” Miss Nona’s voice, rose protestingly. “Darling, why did you?” “Just giving her a vacation,” was the evasive answer. “She’s coming back when business picks up again. Elsie was tired. She needed a rest.” To Geoff’s amazement no one suggested that Cynthia herself was badly in need of a rest, no one said, as Geoff thought they ought to say, that it would be a good idea for Cynthia to sell the shop. He began to watch her, to notice how little she ate, what an effort it seemed to be for her to go upstairs; and one evening he tackled her again on the subject of the shop. She was alone in the big library across the hall. It was the sight of the dark circles beneath the blue eyes which spurred him on to speech. “Look here, Cynthia! Why don’t you sell that infernal shop of yours and take a vacation yourself? You look like the wrath of God these days. I don’t understand what your family is thinking of, not to realize you’re half sick! If I--” He stopped

abruptly for she had risen and crossed the room to him, put one hand on his arm. “Geoff, you’re not to say one word to them! You’ve got to promise me you won’t, do you hear? I’m all right.” She slipped her hand down his arm till she touched his hand, pressed it urgently. “Promise! Promise you’ll not speak to Miss Nona--” “But good heavens, child! She’s your mother--she has a right to know. Anyhow, what’s the use of being so foolish--ruining your health by sticking to that dinky shop? Suppose you do a little promising,” he went on. “Promise me you’ll take a vacation yourself.” She sighed. “Out of the question just now--both of them.” “Then I think,” he averred, “I’d better just see Miss Nona--” Her blue eyes blazed. “What’s my health to you, Geoff Ensioe? After all, you have no right to interfere with my private affairs.” “Rot,” he said inelegantly. “I have the right of a friend--” “Friend? You’re no friend of mine!” “I’ll say I’m not,” he answered with grimness. “Anything less friendly than your attitude toward me I’ve never encountered. But I’m a friend of your family--you're my mother’s goddaughter--” Swiftly her face underwent an entire transformation. Her smile--Geoff admitted Cynthia had a lovely smile “when she uses it, which is darn seldom!”--flashed, her eyes softened. “Then promise for their sakes! You must have seen that Miss Nona is not strong. I don’t want her worried--” “I suppose she won’t worry if you fall ill!” She walked to the window and stood looking out into the garden. “Geoff, listen to me,” she said after a while. She spoke seriously, as though sure of his understanding. “I’m not very well--I admit that. I’m going to get Elsie back just as soon as it’s possible. I can’t sell the shop. For one thing, there’s no one who would buy it just now. If I promise to spare myself as much as possible--if I come home and rest--will you . . . not . . say anything to Miss Nona?” He moved uncomfortably. There had been a hint of tears in her voice just at the end. Why was she so determined to keep her mother in ignorance of her fatigue? Why did she hang on like, grim death to that d—d shop? “Please, Geoff?” “It’s not my business, as you just pointed out,” he said sharply. She shrugged, left the darkened window, walked out of the room. For the next few days she made a special effort to appear cheerful and rested. She spent her evenings down in the old parlor with the rest of them instead of shutting herself upstairs with her accounts. Geoff alone knew that she paid for these hours of leisure by other hours stolen from sleep. He waked several times and saw a crack of light beneath her door across the hall. “Why I don’t put her out of my mind and let her take the consequences of her own foolishness, or break my promise to her and call Miss Nona’s attention to the condition she’s in, I don’t know,” he wrote his mother. “The girl haunts me, somehow. She is so plainly worried about something. Sometimes I think she’s got herself into some kind of trouble in the shop --borrowed money she can’t pay, or something like that. When she’s off guard there’s a look of misery that oughtn’t to be on any young girl’s faco. What about writing her to come find pay you a visit? Perhaps you could advise her--Lord knows I can’t!” To which Mrs. Ensioe replied: “I’m writing Cynthia as you suggest and inviting her to come on to New York for the winter. Yes, for the whole winter! I know that surprises you but all you tell me of the girl impresses me rather favorably. Being a woman, and the sort of woman I am, I can easily understand why Cynthia might not enjoy homelife in the Cary household. “Don’t as you value your own safety, mention to her that it was you who inspired my invitation. She would resent that beyond everything. Let my letter speak for itself.” He watched Cynthia with interest the morning she opened his mother’s letter. Would she read it aloud? Would she express a natural girlish delight? Would she make immediate plans to leave for New York? She did none of these things. She merely put the folded sheet back in its envelope and went on with her breakfast. Neither then nor at a later time did she mention his mother’s invitation to Geoff. * * * * * * Snow was falling; Geoff, home for Saturday afternoon, looked up from the book he was studying to see Tenny, coated and hatted, standing before him. “Can I go out and coast?” she demanded. “I’ve got my new sled that Daddy sent me and it’s a lovely snow!” “Ask Miss Nona, honey!” (TO BE CONTINUED.)

SYNOPSIS

Geoff Judged That This Was the “Dish-Faced” Elsie Dunsmore.

Geoff Remembered That Walk for a Long Time.